“The Last Jedi” may save civilization
Disney’s on a quest to dismantle its own myths. Will we follow?
This post contains spoilers for The Last Jedi.
“It’s time for the Jedi to end.”
So says a silhouetted Luke Skywalker in the trailer for The Last Jedi. The line shocked Star Wars fans, and helped sell more tickets to the movie’s opening weekend than any movie in history — at least since its immediate predecessor, The Force Awakens.
And while the Jedi don’t exactly end in The Last Jedi, the line is not a tease. The entire movie is contained in it, and in that image.
Writer/director Rian Johnson has brought the Star Wars story to a threshold. He looks backward into a narrow past, questioning and rejecting it, while a wide open, unknown future is just out of view.
And Luke is just one of a dozen characters who explore disillusionment, the despair of failure, and the need to let your heroes and teachers go in order to find hope in new places. The film’s dialogue and subplots are densely threaded with critiques of its own predecessors — sometimes angry, mostly mocking.
This self-conscious revisionism is characteristic of the Star Wars saga since Disney purchased the rights to extend it in 2012. These post-Lucas movies have a meta-narrative: How do you advance a story already muddled by its own creator? They contain a subtextual dialogue with the audience about what Star Wars is. Computer-generated or practical? Funny or serious? Finite or extensible? When Kylo Ren says “Let the past die,” we suspect he’s talking about the prequels.
But there’s also a meta-meta-narrative.
“The Last Jedi” is a landmark of American blockbuster storytelling, about American blockbuster storytelling itself.
Granted, we’re in the midst of a wave of self-referential franchises; spinoffs and reboots are the genre of the decade. Our storytellers (and their corporate gatekeepers) are eagerly making copies of already imagined worlds and riffing on them, from Spider-Man to Star Trek to Disney’s pipeline of “live-action” takes on classic cartoons. The Last Jedi could just be infected with this double consciousness.
But I’ve never seen a formal chapter in a saga position itself so fully as a critique of what’s come before. And this is Luke Skywalker — the avatar of the Hero’s Journey mythology — turning on his own legacy.
And he’s doing so under the sponsorship of Disney — the world’s most powerful creative empire.
Walt Disney invented the animated children’s movie 80 years ago with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Its successors cemented an archetype of the fairy tale princess pining for a man to rescue her, which has become as central to the ideology of femininity as the Hero’s Journey is for masculinity. A second-wave feminist tweak in the 90s (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Mulan) was followed by a collapse in the 00s, and merchandising took over the messaging. “Princess culture” dominated the pop cultural landscape for little girls, and led to a massive hyper-gendering of children’s clothes and toys.
But somebody, somewhere in the Magic Kingdom, made a decision to subvert this influence. Disney’s animated features began to hold the princess mythology up for irreverent examination, in increasingly overt ways.
The heroine of 2009’s The Princess and the Frog is not a fairy tale princess pining for a man to rescue her; she’s a working-class black woman in a real American city, and she spends most of the movie avoiding the romantic attentions of the prince. A year later, Tangled gave us a princess in pursuit of her own freedom, with romance a secondary prize.
Then came 2013’s Frozen.
This was The Last Jedi of princess movies. Presented with iconic concepts like love at first sight and “true love’s first kiss,” Frozen’s characters react with frustration, shock, or common-sense eye-rolls. They tell each other, and the audience, that the very mantras that Disney movies have drilled into children’s heads for decades are out of date.
“You can’t marry a man you’ve just met,” says Elsa to Anna — which basically means: “It’s time for the princess movie to end.”
Frozen was a global phenomenon. The world was ready to rethink the template that had built Disney’s cultural dominance — and amazingly, so was Disney.
The next princess movie was Moana (2016): a Hero’s Journey about a strong, brave adventurer with a cosmic destiny, who leaves home to rescue an imprisoned ally, outwit giant monsters, and end the oppressive reign of a powerful magical being. That the hero was a teenage Polynesian girl, whose dreams include not a whiff of romantic longing, signaled that Disney was redefining some of its own terms.
Even between these princess-oriented milestones, Disney’s animation teams took aim at the conventional archetypes of their own back catalog — and the harmful real-world mindsets that have hardened around them.
- Wreck-It Ralph (2012) asks, what do you do if you want to be a hero, but your society thinks you’re a bad guy (and you do have a track record of destroying things)? Do you freak out (the way so many white men are doing when reminded about racism and sexism)? Or is there a place for you in a diverse world?
- Big Hero 6 (2014) introduces a superhero team with more ethnic and gender diversity than had appeared in the entire history of Hollywood animation — led not by a tough man out for vengeance, but by a young math nerd struggling with grief and depression.
- Zootopia (2016) is about talking animals. But it also takes on the struggle to create an egalitarian society after a history of oppression. Come for the witty visuals; stay for the lessons on implicit bias!
With increasing confidence, Disney Animation has been telling stories that deliberately set up versions of old characters and narratives, then show us another way to see them. It still produces cultural touchstones, but they reject the very lessons their classic predecessors have been peddling. After building mythologies for generations of children around the world, the studio now orients against its own tropes. They’re undoing their own propaganda.
And in the middle of this extraordinary project, Disney bought Lucasfilm.
The Last Jedi seems to confirm that, under the leadership of Kathleen Kennedy, Star Wars will be part of the ambitious cultural agenda. It’s surprising, to say the least, to see a radical deconstruction of dominant ideology coming from a corporation that has been a purveyor of conservative fairy tales since its founding.
But, unlikely as it is, it’s happening. And it’s brave, delicate, and — I would argue — essential to the future of our civilization. I hope it works.
We are watching long-standing narratives reach dead ends all around us.
For generations, we’ve told our children stories about how progress is made: by defeating enemies, whatever the cost. By trusting superheroes to use “justifiable” violence. By associating straight white men uniquely with the superhero mantle, and excluding anyone of color, or female, or queer from the cast of characters.
These stories reinforced and reflected the real world: the developed West, led by white men, pursued progress through industrialization and colonization — enslaving Africans and oppressing their descendants, blocking women from influence, extracting the earth’s resources.
And our current world is proving the inadequacy of these stories. White male CEOs and their accomplices have been richly rewarded, but the common people are not living happily ever after. The consequences of the choices once seen as “heroic” are now all too clear: in the chaotic climate, in our debilitated democracy, in our segregated and polarized society.
But we’re in a pivotal moment. The Senate has not dissolved; the Rebellion has not taken up arms. In fact, the white men of the Empire are being invited to join the rest of humanity to repair the damage.
Yet, millions of us are lashing out. Claiming that our identity, “our heritage” — our story — is under siege.
No wonder. Our stories tell us only that we are chosen. That we must fight to the end. That other people — those we don’t call “white” or “male” — play only minor roles.
We are stuck with the old texts: a Constitution written by slaveholders, neighborhoods zoned by racists, an economy deregulated by corporations. With legends of muscular, glowering white men in capes, surrounded by rubble and draped with a scantily clad young woman. With fairy tales of spunky girls with tiny waists whose dreams come true with a kiss from a stranger.
These stories tell us nothing about the kind of heroism we need right now: the heroism of stepping aside and joining a new quest with new rules. How do we write a new chapter of our saga when so much of what’s come before is so deeply flawed? How do we rethink the old archetypes, and create new myths that include everyone in a quest to restore justice in a broken world?
If only the greatest assembly of creative resources in the history of the world would create and market stories about precisely that.
If only the greatest assembly of creative resources in the history of the world would create and market stories that rethink old archetypes and create new, inclusive myths. Oh, wait.
Enter Disney.
When Kristoff asks permission to kiss Anna at the end of Frozen, millions of boys see consent as a cornerstone of relationships.
When Wreck-it Ralph applies his strength in service of a disabled girl who is bullied by her peers, millions of aspiring tough guys see heroism in playing a small role in a bigger story.
When Judy Hopps, having broken the glass ceiling in the police force in Zootopia, promotes harmful stereotypes and hurts her friend Nick Wilde, millions of girls see how intersectionality and privilege play out — and how taking action can restore trust.
When Polynesian culture is presented as thrilling, gorgeous, and universal, millions of white children open up their idea of heroism to include a fuller range of humanity than my generation got from Tintin and James Bond.
And now, under the same profit-driven, hegemonic corporate umbrella, Kathleen Kennedy is using Star Wars to reframe even more of these stories.
All three new movies so far center on women heroes surrounded by people of African, Latino, Asian, and European descent. All three emphasize friendship and sacrifice over destiny and family inheritance.
But The Last Jedi goes further than any of these. Its entire story functions as a myth to end myths.
Luke Skywalker rejects the premise that a “Luke Skywalker” could save the galaxy with a “laser sword” — dismissing the entire quest so many of us have been unhealthily attached to for decades. His revisionist lessons pointedly critique the implications of earlier Star Wars movies: about who gets to use the Force, about whether the Jedi were just. But even as he shrugs off as a “failure” six movies that influenced millions, he learns to see himself in a new role as a mentor to a diverse generation.
These younger heroes, meanwhile, pursue new kinds of Hero’s Journeys. The dashing male pilot, who would have been celebrated for ignoring orders and going it alone in a traditional Star Wars story, learns that longer-term strategic thinking pays off (and that the leadership of women should not be underestimated).
A brave pair of spies (played by actors of color), who have personal experience with the impact of oppression, discover that good guys and bad guys alike operate in a tangled system of greed and violence.
Instead of “I am your father,” we get “You’re nobody” — a discovery that links heroism not to heredity, but to experience. Rey isn’t destined to be powerful; she’s powerful because she learned to thrive in challenging circumstances.
And even as the iconic characters of our childhoods are dispatched one by one, the filmmakers suggest that our hope lies not in “chosen ones,” but in the mass mobilization of ordinary people.
The storytellers of Disney are in Luke’s position.
These wizards seem to understand that they have been part of a legacy that, while being extremely entertaining, did unintended damage to our galaxy.
Yet they still have the world’s attention. And so they have made it their mission to use their powers for good.
Instead of reinforcing the hierarchies and tunnel vision that continue to divide society, they are offering to us a narrative way out. Through the stories of brave princesses, defecting stormtroopers, and white men who let their power go, they are showing us the way to rewrite our own mythologies as a nation and as a society. To break through the hardened injustices that hold us back.
As we watch these stories with our children, we’re assembling the pieces of a map — not to the heroes of the past, but to a rebuilt world with happier endings for all.
The Jedi will end, and the Force will still be with us.
